Patients lined hallways for pills in Morristown doctor's scheme

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. (WVLT) -- A Morristown doctor and his wife were sentenced Wednesday on one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and 10 counts of health care fraud that involved opioid prescriptions.

According to the Eastern District of Tennessee's U.S. Attorney's office, 64-year-old Dr. Abdelrahman Mohamed and 59-year-old Cecilia Manacsa were sentenced to serve 36 and 16 months respectively in federal prison. In addition to that sentence, Mohamed also paid $730,000 in restitution.

According to the DA's office, Mohamed owned and operated Hamblen Neuroscience Center (HNC), a neurology and pain management facility that was located in Morristown. Manacsa, Mohamed's wife, worked at HNC as a supervisor of various employees, including an employee responsible for submitting bills to Medicare and Medicaid.

Mohamed, the only physician on staff at HNC, provided medical treatment to a variety of patients, most of whom visited the clinic to get treatment of chronic pain and had health insurance through TennCare or Medicare.

The DA's office said between January 2012 and September 2016, Mohamed and Manacsa came up with a scheme to schedule many more patients per day than Mohamed could actually see. On an average day, they would schedule between 40 and 60 patients to be seen during the estimated six-hour period that Mohamed worked.

To deal with the high volume of patients, staff members were often instructed to line up patients in the hallway outside of Mohamed's office, escort the first patient into his office for a one- or two-minute open-door meeting, and then hand the doctor a partially completed prescription for an opiate pain management medication, which Mohamed would then sign and give to the patient. The DA's office said that process was repeated until all waiting patients had gotten their prescription for an opiate medication.

Each patient would then schedule another appointment for the next month, when they would go through the process again.

Mohamed admitted issuing thousands of prescriptions for opiate controlled substances on a recurring monthly basis, often for years. He also said that when he was issuing those prescriptions, he did it outside the scope of ordinary medical practice.

The DA's office said that after patients' visits, Mohamed and Manacsa told their staff to submit fraudulent bills to TennCare and Medicare that claimed they were owed approximately $1,538,000 for services they had not actually provided. The fraud resulted in Medicare and TennCare paying approximately $733,000 to the clinic.